COVID-19 Response Story

Building Ventilators at the Onset of COVID-19

We all remember precise moments from the onset of COVID.

The offices closing. Schools were stopping. Grocery store limitations.

Roughly two weeks after much of the U.S. had shut down, DFM Solutions received a call from a customer – they were transitioning a former manufacturing space, now vacant, into a ventilator production facility.

Jim Rudis, a DFM Solutions account manager, immediately drove from DFM’s headquarters in Detroit, Michigan, to the site in West Melbourne, Florida – the place he’d stay for the next eight weeks while working 12-14 hours daily, including weekends.

“We had to plan, staff and create an infrastructure for a manufacturing plant from the ground up,” Rudis said. “The building we operated out of was completely vacant.  We had to get the heat and A/C turned on, no compressed air or airdrops.”

After doing daily temperature checks, the team met, socially distanced, in the parking lot twice a day for coordination and status updates.

Mass Producing Ventilators

A significant construction point was the clean room, where ventilators could be safely made, including a sub-assembly and final assembly space.

Each team had to enter through separate doors – which is where DFM Solutions stepped up to support through logistics, workforce, procedures, standard work instructions, training and test stands.

Another way Rudis and his team stepped up were through the tubes and fittings on the actual ventilators.

“The different size tubes were all color-coded and had to be assembled exactly to the drawing,” he said. “This was very difficult to do by hand; we purchased pneumatic tubing spreaders to help with this process.”

The team also had no air lines in the sub-assembly room, so they spent a weekend running air lines to 12 different stations.

The result was a space that could produce 50,000 ventilators annually – and save lives across the U.S.

“Our customer and DFM were unified in the approach,” Rudis said. “There were no egos – just a complete focus on the job at hand. It was all teamwork, coordination and effort and, in the end, I’m hopeful we helped save lives.”

DFM Solutions offers a full range of facility, maintenance, and project/engineering services for industrial and commercial operations. Headquartered in Detroit, the company serves customers across the U.S.

(Above) DFM Solutions, alongside our customer and partners, helped transform a vacant facility into a ventilator manufacturing facility in the weeks following COVID-19 shutdowns across the nation.

(Above) The teams tested the ventilators and worked on the best processes to manufacture efficiently in the facility.

(Above) The DFM Solutions team cleaned the facility regularly to ensure that building the ventilators would be precise.  

(Above) The team walked into this empty facility to create a ventilator manufacturing facility.